DC Comics' answer to Monster High and Ever After High, the DC Super Hero Girls is a media franchise geared towards young female comics fans, focusing on the female heroes and villains within the DC Comics universe. It launched in 2015 with a toyline and a series of online shorts.
The first generation of the franchise, headed by writer Shea Fontana, features younger, teenage versions of many of its characters attending a special Superhero School together, with Wonder Woman as a Fish out of Water who has left Themyscira for the first time. The second generation of the franchise, originally developed by Lauren Faust, follows the traditional "waking up, going to school then saving the world" setup, with the cast now making use of their usual secret identities. Barbara Gordon serves as the central protagonist here, though Wonder Woman remains as team leader.
Compare Marvel Rising, which is Marvel Comics' own cross-media franchise aimed at young girls.
Works in the franchise include:
- DC Super Hero Girls: The original toyline.
- DC Super Hero Girls: A web series developed by Shea Fontana, consisting of a series of minutes-long animated shorts. Served as the original centerpiece of the franchise, lasting from 2015 to 2018.
- DC Super Hero Girls: A series of children's chapter books set in the same universe as the web series.
- LEGO DC Super Hero Girls: A series of LEGO films and specials that began release in 2017.
- DC Super Hero Girls: A television series developed by Lauren Faust, which serves as a Continuity Reboot for the franchise. Premiered in 2019.
Tropes Featured Across The Franchise:
- Age Lift: Many adult characters are aged down to be teenagers.
- Action Figure Justification: Actually invoked by Mattel when they made the toys for the franchise. In the hopes of having a crossover audience, there were two toylines released simultaneously. There were a set of 11.5" Fashion Dolls, with combable hair and cloth outfits, and then a set of 6" Action Figures of molded plastic. The series was retooled in 2019, and the smaller action figures were dropped in favor of heavily stylized and redesigned fashion dolls.
- Cast of Snowflakes: More so in the Lauren Faust-developed reboot, the main six girls and the broader cast demonstrate an impressive visual variety of costumes, body types and racial representation.
- Feminist Fantasy: One of the main hooks of the franchise; it stars a group of teenaged, popular DC women, like Wonder Woman and Batgirl, in the forefront of an action-comedy superhero series aimed at young girls.
- High School AU: The general premise of the series places familiar DC characters, primarily focusing on their diverse assortment of women, in a high school setting.
- Intra-Franchise Crossover: The final graphic novel tie-in of the original 2015 DC Super Hero Girls, Spaced Out, features a mild crossover between them and their 2019 counterparts in Chapter 13. 2015’s Zatanna opens a seeing portal between the two universes, allowing the 2015 cast to be bystanders to a typical crime-stopping adventure of the 2019 cast.
